Sai Aparna Aketi

Aparna received her B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, India in 2018. During the final two years of her undergraduate studies, under the mentorship of Prof. Joycee Meike, she focused on Radiation Hardening By Design research. For a summer internship at the University of Southern California, Aparna collaborated with Prof. Peter A. Beerel, working on radiation-hardened asynchronous system design. She was the recipient of the President’s Gold Medal, Institute Gold Medal, and an award for best performance in the core courses of physics, chemistry, and life sciences at IIT Gandhinagar for her academic excellence. She joined Purdue in the Fall of 2018 as a Ph.D. student under the guidance of Professor Kaushik Roy. In the initial years of her Ph.D., she explored various topics related to efficient machine learning methods such as pruning, early exits, and low-precision training. Her research interests span Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning, Federated Learning, and Decentralized Optimization. Currently, she is actively involved in developing algorithms for decentralized (peer-to-peer) learning setups that support heterogeneous data distributions.